Read Online The Waking That Kills by Stephen Gregory - Free Book Online Page B

tick of the fuel pump priming. But then, when I pressed the starter button there was nothing but a click.
    ‘It’s dead. Not going anywhere.’
    Juliet and Lawrence stood and watched, as I tried again. Futile, the second and third attempts. I was puzzled and annoyed. Puzzled, because I was certain I’d shut the door the other day, when I’d started the car and warmed it up and then switched off. Annoyed, because the presence of my father was so strong that I could hear him chuntering... I’d had the car a couple of weeks and already neglected its maintenance. Juliet folded her arms across her chest and frowned. The boy met my eyes without blinking, for one second. Then he looked away, and his hand went to his neck and he rubbed at the place where the nettles had swiped him in the night.
    I let the door swing shut on its own weight. I went round to the back, muttering, ‘Jump leads, my father’s got everything in here, I’m sure there’ll be jump leads...’ I opened the door to the yawning space which had been his workshop and living-room and bedroom, clambered in and reached across the box of newspapers for the toolbox. When I lifted the lid, the leads uncoiled and sprang out, a black snake and a red one, as if they’d been waiting for me in the darkness. I was saying over my shoulder, ‘Is it possible to get your car down here, Juliet, and try to get this poor old thing started?’ and at the same time the snakes reminded me of how Lawrence had recoiled from the newspapers when he’d first peered into the car.
    I climbed out of the hearse. My eyes fell on the headlines at the top of the pile: a football match, a hat-trick in a cup final or something. I did a double-take and read the headline again.
    Before I could turn my thoughts into words, Lawrence butted in. ‘So are we up for this?’ My jumble of suspicions – the light I’d seen in the night, the boy’s off-hand remark about his sleeplessness, the car door ajar, and now the papers rearranged – my suspicions stayed jumbled. They were real, as real as the sting of a nettle... but they needed an itch to create a visible rash, needed a scratch to form the clear white blebs. Before I could ask Lawrence why he’d been in the car in the night, he’d said with an exaggerated boldness, ‘So, are we up for this? Can’t you hear them? Let’s get up there!’
    It was no good Juliet trying again to dissuade her son. High in the sky, above and around the very top of the Scots pine, the swifts were screaming. The boy wanted to climb to the tree-house, and he wanted me to go with him. He wanted the upper-hand, he wanted to exert some kind of authority over me, to give me the option of feebly declining the challenge or letting him take me where his dare-devil father had been, to the summit of the tallest tree in the woodland. The other day, in his room, I’d somehow diminished him, by overruling him on his own territory. So now he said, with a crowing self-confidence, ‘Mum, listen. He’s a teacher, he wants to teach me about the swifts. So what’s best? Sitting in my bedroom with a bird-book, reading and looking at the pictures and peeping out of the window with our binoculars? Or climbing into the sky, to be with the swifts, to be where the swifts live? What’s best?’ And turning to me, claiming the moment by tugging the jump-leads out of my hand, he said, ‘What’s best, Mr Teacher? What do you think?’
    He handed the jump-leads to his mother. ‘Of course I’m up for it,’ I said.
     
     
    I T WAS EASY at first. Despite my muzzy head, I was still fit from all my running and cycling on hot tropical afternoons. Lawrence swarmed up and up the tree and I followed, more slowly and deliberately. He was lighter, sinewy-strong, and he moved so easily through the dry black branches that he seemed to be dancing. I paused for breath and looked down. Juliet seemed a long way away, her face turned up, her mouth open and her eyes anxious. Beside her, the bulk